


bite

by smileymikey



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24918082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smileymikey/pseuds/smileymikey
Summary: Ronan’s had a strange look on his face throughout the table read, so Adam can’t really be surprised when he says to Henry, “Should there be tongue?”It’s still utterly appalling. “Jesus, Lynch,” Adam sighs.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 22
Kudos: 225





	bite

**Author's Note:**

> title from bite by troye sivan
> 
> we all need a bit of actor!pynch in our lives

Ronan’s had a strange look on his face throughout the table read, so Adam can’t really be surprised when he says to Henry, “Should there be tongue?”

It’s still utterly appalling. “Jesus, Lynch,” Adam sighs.

Henry is remarkably adept at getting used to this sort of shit. “Do whatever you want,” he says. “I just need a kiss.”

“But as a director,” Ronan pushes, “you direct me.”

“As a director,” Henry says, “I don’t care. Put your tongue in Parrish’s mouth. Don’t put your tongue in Parrish’s mouth. Surprise me. Schrodinger’s tongue.”

“Bad directing,” Ronan says, as Henry walks away.

Adam says, “What’s this really about, Ronan?”

Usually, Adam’s taller, only by an inch, less, when Ronan wears his big boots, but sat on the windowsill, as Ronan stands in front of him, he has to look up to meet his eyes. Not that Ronan is making it easy: he’s scowling after Henry, like Henry’s personally wronged him.

“Nothing,” Ronan says, because he’s an asshole. “Just don’t think he’s doing very good at being a director.”

“Look at me,” Adam says.

“It’s the principal of the matter, Parrish,” Ronan says, but he does anyway. Adam throws caution to the wind, puts a hand on the side of his face. There’s a chance Ronan will bite it straight off, but instead he just makes an impatient sound. It’s _this_ – this blurred line between them, where it gets increasingly harder to discern what’s real and what’s residue from the characters – that’s the biggest problem. On the surface, Adam’s just as close with Ronan as he is Gansey, or Blue.

And yet.

“You’re being fastidious,” Adam says.

“What, you swallow a dictionary?” Ronan sighs as he says it.

“Wow, sick burn, Lynch.”

“Shut up.” Ronan rests his hand on the sill next to Adam’s thigh, picks at a flaking paint chip with his nail. He can’t be more than a few inches away from his leg, and yet Adam feels it like a red-hot brand, so in tune with Ronan and Ronan’s body and his hands and his brain that they may as well be on him.

He doesn’t say anything, so Adam indulges him. “Seriously, what’s up?”

“Nothing.”

Ronan’s a shit liar. “Ronan.”

“Cheng’s a terrible director,” Ronan says. “Should be fired. No one should hire him again.”

From across the room, Henry says, “Suck my dick, Lynch.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan says, but without bite.

Adam watches his expression, runs his thumb over the highest point of Ronan’s face. Objectively, he’s always known that Ronan is handsome – he supposes you don’t get hired as an actor unless you have some sort of allure. But Ronan is handsome in the same way that a horse kicks, the sort of striking that Adam has usually reserved for churches, hollowed out and echoey, filled with statues and green shadows. With Adam’s hand on his cheek, he looks like the strangest of juxtapositions – angry, pinched, softened by the gold of Adam’s skin.

Ronan’s still stiff and scowling, so Adam pulls his hand away from his face, swallows his apprehension and puts them around his waist instead, drawing him into the V of his legs. Ronan goes – willingly isn’t the right word, but as if it’s completely normal, as if it’s routine. Adam guesses that maybe it is. How strange to think their bodies have become so used to each other that they can adapt like this, mould out these spaces where they can neatly fit into each other like puzzle pieces, completely unbidden. How strange, to think they live where Adam thinks he’s kissed Ronan more times than he’s kissed anyone.

It works a charm, though. Ronan’s scowl remains spectacular but pressed so close together, Adam so consciously aware of every place they touch, as though their nerve endings are hotwired together, he feels the line of tension in Ronan’s body dissolve.

“Can you get it together, then?” Adam says. It’s a dangerous game, to let his tone toe the line of flirty, but unsurprisingly he’s found he’s pretty much glutton for punishment when it comes to Ronan.

Ronan gives him an unimpressed look. “I’m always together,” he says. “I’m a fucking professional.”

“Then stop being weird.”

“You’re being weird,” Ronan says, but the weird tension between them has gone, they’re back on familiar territory. Adam’s master plan worked: Ronan’s already easing, his caginess gone. Another blurred line.

“Good comeback,” is all Adam says.

“Fuck you, I’m working on weak material. Sorry your insults are so shit.”

“You’re so shit,” Adam says, just to make him smile. Ronan squeezes his thighs.

“Who’s got the good comebacks now, asshole?”

They’re both laughing when across the room Henry calls, “Places, everyone!” Adam is aware of the people around them shifting, the crew adjusting their cameras. He glances at Ronan, who has fallen quiet, instead staring thoughtfully at something just above Adam’s eyeline. (Adam uses thoughtfully in the way one might put together a puzzle.) He doesn’t say anything, just waits, knows Ronan will speak whenever he fancies; instead, tucks his hands tighter around the small of his back, pulls him in further. Sometimes he feels like in moments like this they could just dissolve into each other.

Ronan just quietly touches his thumb to a spot above Adam’s eyebrow, fitting his fingerprint in a wave in his hair. He says, “Is your hair curly?”

“Not really,” Adam says. “Just fell asleep with it wet.” He lets the hand spanning Ronan’s back slide a little to the back of his neck, where his hairline starts. It is prickly against his palm. “What’s yours like?”

“Can’t really remember. Haven’t worn it long for years.”

“Have you ever thought about growing it out again?”

“Sometimes. I don’t think I would, though. I’d look like Declan.”

Adam doesn’t say that he already does.

“Scene five, take one,” Henry says, from behind them. There is the snick of the clapper board. “Action.”

Adam touches the nape of Ronan’s neck with the tip of his finger. “You ready?” he says.

“Your mouth isn’t a marathon, Parrish,” Ronan says, and Adam rolls his eyes and pulls him into a kiss.

Kissing Ronan is something Adam has had to get used to, over time. He remembers the first time they met, sat across from each other at the first table read: Ronan was slouched down in his chair, arms crossed, staring down at his script with a scowl. (Adam has come to learn that this is customary and simply his resting face.) He had felt his presence like a brand, so very aware that this was the person he was going to have to be in love with for the near future; strangely, couldn’t look him in the eyes for the longest time. Their first kiss had been at five in the morning of a blisteringly cold day, on a rooftop. Adam doesn’t remember much, thinks he’s blocked most of it out, except that his fingers had felt like they were going to fall off, and that it tasted of coffee. Afterwards, Ronan had taken off his gloves and handed them over to Adam, and then managed to get a pigeon to peck at his fingers like a strange urban Snow White. It was so contradictory to the huge tattoo Adam knows spans his back, and the shaved head, and cold hard eyes that Adam remembers watching him in quiet awe, and thinking, _this is going to be interesting_.

It’s been two years since that day, and Adam has kissed Ronan a lot more times since then. He’s learnt that if he bites down, gently, on Ronan’s bottom lip, he can get him to make a sound almost like a sigh; if they use tongue, to let Ronan make the first move; that Ronan likes his hair pulled. He’s sensitive behind the ears; once Adam experimentally bit his neck, and Ronan fell backwards off the wall he was sitting on. (Privately, one of Adam’s greatest achievements.) It’s weird, that they exist in a grey area where Adam can know this kind of thing, but professionally; where there is an hour where he can suck bruises into Ronan’s throat, and then an hour where he can’t press a thumb into them, like he sometimes wants to do.

There is a fading bruise right now, under the hinge of his jaw, and Adam wants to touch it, so he does: presses a fingerprint into it, feels Ronan’s pulse jump beneath his skin. In response, Ronan nips at his lower lip, fists a hand into his hair, pushes him harder against the windowsill.

“Cut!” 

They pull apart, breathless. Ronan’s mouth is spit-slick; Adam’s eyes can’t help but be drawn to them, watches as he swipes his tongue across his bottom lip. When he looks back up, he sees that Ronan is watching him, and he swallows.

“Not bad,” he says.

“Fuck you, that was great,” Ronan says.

Adam can’t help it. Shrugs. “Not your best.”

“Oh, I’ll show you my best,” Ronan says, pulls him back in.

Adam is distantly aware of Henry calling the cameras to start rolling again, hears the accustomed shuffle of feet as people around him act out their scene, but all he can focus on is Ronan, who is licking into his mouth, his hands inching up his thighs, pushing him against the window. Adam can hear the slick of their mouths together, the wet pop as they pull apart briefly; a string of saliva connects their lips, and Adam finds it so inexplicably hot that he pulls Ronan back in again, until he is pressed right into the flush of his thighs.

It’s probably something he should probably back away from. Their entire relationship is one huge game of gay chicken, especially in moments like these: how far can they go, how long will they string along a moment this time. The fact they are so in tune with each other, the fact that Adam knows how to make Ronan whine, the same way Ronan knows how to make his toes curl in his shoes, serves probably only to make it worse.

Then, Ronan moves away from his mouth, presses kisses against his jaw, moves to his neck, and _bites_.

Adam feels every muscle in his body tense up, and he’s so shocked a whine escapes him, unbidden. Henry calls, “Cut!” and when Ronan pulls away he’s laughing.

“What the fuck was that?” Adam demands. He can still feel Ronan’s mouth against his neck, like a phantom imprint. He wants to move his hand up to touch, see if he can feel teeth marks. That definitely should not be as hot as it is.

Ronan simply raises an eyebrow, because he’s an asshole. “Good enough for you, Parrish?”

Adam narrows his eyes. He is not one to back down from so obvious a goad. “That was the best you can do?” he says. “Really?”

“You didn’t like that?”

“Think it was all right.”

“All right?”

“Nothing I haven’t had before.”

“Really,” Ronan says, undecipherable. His eyes are alight with something. “Lucky for you, that was just a warm-up.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They’ve never gotten this far. Adam swallows his reservations, sits up, until he and Ronan are almost nose-to-nose. Ronan goes cross-eyed trying to look at him; he licks his lips, and when he exhales Adam feels it on his mouth. He steels himself. “Then,” he says, “kiss me like you fucking mean it.”

Ronan pulls back. Their eyes meet; indecision. They are straddling this fine line between them, between fantasy and reality, more so than they ever have before. Adam’s always been pretty fucking good at his job but he knows that he isn’t acting now. The way Ronan’s eyes flash at him, he thinks maybe he isn’t either.

He hears Henry shout, “Rolling!” but it doesn’t matter, because then Ronan is pulling him again, kissing him with a fervour Adam has never experienced before. He’s had his fair share of kisses, back at school and at college, in the dark bars in between, even had his fair share with Ronan, but not like this. Never like this. Ronan kisses him like he’s going to war, like he’s got something to prove, like he and Adam are the last people on earth and without him he will die. This won’t be the take they use, Adam knows that as soon as they break apart Henry will give them a lecture on the art of a glamorous romance, it’s too messy and loaded, too full of Adam and Ronan, but Adam doesn’t care, all he can think about is Ronan, Ronan, Ronan, the way he is grabbing the collar of his shirt, the way Ronan’s hands are on his thighs, the sound of their mouths together. Ronan nudges him deeper into the sill, until Adam is almost slouched, Ronan pushing him back, and Adam realises he’s still got one last trick up his sleeve. His hand slips down from the back of Ronan’s jacket, moves all the way down his spine, down, down, settles briefly into the small of his back, where his hand always fits – then he grins into the kiss and palms Ronan’s ass.

“For heaven’s sake, cut,” Henry says, but neither of them are listening, because now Ronan’s hands are in his hair, pulling him so close for a few moments Adam thinks they are going to fold into each other, like origami animals, twist together to form new shapes. Adam slides his hand into his back pocket and squeezes his ass and Ronan sighs into his mouth, and this isn’t even acting anymore, this is them, them them them, and Adam doesn’t think he can remember a time where they haven’t been on this windowsill making out—

Ronan pulls away with a heavy exhale. They both meet each other’s eyes. Ronan’s pupils are wide-blown, his mouth bruised, shirt rumpled. Adam can’t say he looks any better.

“Well?” Ronan says, breathless. “How was that?”

“Don’t know,” Adam says, to be an asshole. “Might need another go.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he hears Henry moan behind them, but it’s all worth it for Ronan’s smile, as he pulls him back in.


End file.
